MASTER YOUR INTERACTIONS

Getting ahead means harnessing & coordinating ideas from the best experts inside and outside your organization. But creating and securing high-performing collaborative digital work environments is the challenge of our time.

BusinessGuest for SharePoint is a packaged solution that provides a quick, easy, user-friendly, secure and practical way to share files and collaborate two-ways with external people from SharePoint, without the need to set up an extranet or even open the firewall!

Compatible with the High Performance Internal Collaboration solution SocialFactor™

BUSINESS CASE:

Legal Contract Digital Signature from SharePoint

This video shows how BusinessGuest for SharePoint can let you point and click to legally sign contracts with external people who have no access to SharePoint! The electronic signature used has legal validity.

BusinessGuest is the easiest form of external collaboration since e-mail

BusinessGuest is based on a solution that’s installed on your internal or private business application (such as Microsoft SharePoint), that lets users share and collaborate with external partners contextually on business items (such as documents). The solution then connects to a secure sharing area that may be in the Cloud or installed in your organization’s external network.

External people receive e-mails when you share items with them, and can retrieve the information or documents that was shared with them using links in the e-mails.

Either by replying to the e-mails or by working from the sharing area, external partners can interact or update this information.

Internally, the solution on the business application periodically checks the sharing area and updates the internal data to track and (if the security policy allows it) reflect changes made in the sharing area.

Work from Your Business Platform

How to quickly share documents with external people from your internal business platform, such as SharePoint, and track the email conversations with them?

Just activate BusinessGuest from your internal business platform and start sharing and exchanging with external partners right away.

This way, you and your coworkers keep working in their familiar environment. You don’t need to use multiple tools depending on who you collaborate with or to manually reconcile data that’s in your email and the team data that’s in the business platform. And your company will get immediate return on investment on their BusinessGuest investment by saving tons of storage normally used by email attachments and by ensuring the continuity of the collaboration and the capitalization of knowledge in all projects.

And the BusinessGuest licensing model is flexible: your IT can either get a BusinessGuest license for you, or they can just deploy a free package and let you activate your subscription on your own budget.

Click & Share Files with External Partners

Just click on any internal file to share it with external partners out of your business applications and out of your network!

From a document library, click on a file and select “Share…” to send it out to your internal colleagues and external partners!

From your PC: click on a local file and share it in your internal platform and to external partners!

From your Email: forward a message and its attachments to your SharePoint site and BusinessGuest will automatically send it to internal team members (as a link) and to external partners (by email)!

You will save time whenever you need to share a document with your internal and external teammates, while at the same time always make sure they will receive it on time!

Add a Message

Whenever you share files, you can add a message and get the collaboration started, right from SharePoint. More than a mere alerting and file sharing mechanism, BusinessGuest is an advanced remote collaboration solution that includes conversation tracking inside and outside your network.

External Partners Receive Emails and Attachments or Download Links

Your external partners don’t need to connect to SharePoint, enter a password and find their way!

With BusinessGuest, they just work as usual: receive attached files, automatically replaced by direct cloud download links for larger files!

No need to teach them SharePoint! No password! No login! No problem!

On your side, all interactions, messages, file revisions are automatically tracked in SharePoint.

Track Reads and Downloads in SharePoint

Get real time tracking in SharePoint when your partners receive the message, open the attachments, update them or reply to the message!

Track Replies in SharePoint

When your partners reply (by email), their message is automatically captured, added to the SharePoint conversation and shared with your team! There is even a visual mapping of the dialogue to ensure everybody can catch up and understand the whole conversation at any time!

Track New Versions of Files in SharePoint

When the external partners open the attached document, modify it and send it back, BusinessGuest automatically updates your SharePoint library and creates a new revision of the document!

No more risks of using the wrong version!

Manage your Internal & External Team

BusinessGuest lets you choose who among your SharePoint users can participate in the conversations with external people, and add or remove external partners easily at the project level or at the discussion level.

Therefore the composition of project teams is always clear and shared, and can be updated at any time!

SharePoint 2010 or 2013 Foundation or higher on premise, SSL Connectivity to the sharing area (in your DMZ or in the cloud)

SharePoint Version: BusinessGuest works with SharePoint 2010 On premise (Foundation, Server and Enterprise versions) and SharePoint 2013 On premise (through a WSP package). A SharePoint 2013 Online App will be available soon for online deployment!

SharePoint Authentication: Internal SharePoint users can authenticate using Windows or Claims authentication but only one authentication mechanism must be used at a time on the SharePoint farm. No SharePoint authentication required for external users (BusinessGuest users).

Network Connectivity: Although BusinessGuest allows to work with external people and to let them publish contents in your SharePoint site (the way you let them do it), there is no need for any inbound connectivity from the outside to your SharePoint servers! The only connectivity requirement is to let your SharePoint servers initiate outbound encrypted TCP/IP connections to your DMZ if you deploy you own on-premise sharing area, or to our cloud web services: host cloud.business-guest.com on port 443.

Email Server: BusinessGuest uses email exchanges to send SharePoint information and documents to external partners and to receive their feedback and track it on SharePoint. However, it is our own Email systems that are used to manage these exchanges. Therefore the only requirement on your email systems is to be able to send and receive emails to and from @business-guest.com addresses.

Yes

BusinessGuest will automatically detect your network proxy configuration and use your proxy to connect from SharePoint to the sharing area.

BusinessGuest makes secure SharePoint extranet easy

Designed out-of-the-box for Microsoft SharePoint, BusinessGuest is a unique approach to making it easy and straightforward to share and collaborate with external people from an internal SharePoint environment.

Installed in 5 to 15 minutes, requiring no network reconfiguration nor additional network or security devices, it nicely complements SharePoint built-in features to add what users need to interact with external people from a mere e-mail address, while maintaining a high level and manageable level of security.

Compatible with SharePoint 2013 Foundation, Standard & Enterprise

Compatible with SharePoint 2010 Foundation, Standard & Enterprise

Testimonials

Calinda Software's compatibility with Outlook was a key factor for the group's Direction of Innovation to choose the solution. As a result, it integrates easily in the collaboration processes of our employees.